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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

What about a mesh that is not connected to the internet?

These days, people use the internet like TV or radio: many consume, few produce.

What about a "community" mesh, where e.g. a small town has websites, email, webservices, gaming hosts etc for shops, businesses, sporting, clubs, council, local news and social media for that town?

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https://disaster.radio is a neat little project that might be helpful for building something like this.

I've been working a bit on https://baculus.co which has some overlap with that use case. Super early hacking, mainly built on scuttlebutt and other services on rpi3s, all in backpacks.

It's entirely possible to build a WISP and have no transit upstreams or peers. If you wanted to truly island it you'd need additional DNS infrastructure that most wisps don't have. Never seen it done, though, because the use cases for such a thing are rare, vs a wisp that provides a default route to its customers out to the internet.

For the same reason communities don't build a second road system not connected to the main road system. Why would I want to build a system that makes it so I can't check websites, email, webservices, gaming hosts, businesses, clubs, council, local news, and social media just because I'm in the next town over during work?

Also if you really wanted to only have services available locally why not just do that via access control policy instead of building a second infrastructure?

That place still exists on the internet. The 90s are alive on Tor.

can you elaborate on this? would love to explore, but where exactly to start?

Check out Broadband-HamNet.

>>> a small town has websites, email, webservices, gaming hosts etc for shops, businesses, sporting, clubs, council, local news and social media for that town?

Facebook.

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